by Mark R. DeLong
This month, I’m closing up the years-long run of my Substack newsletter. I’ve decided to stand up my own newsletter site, despite the hassle, the modest expense, and the loss of what Substack touts as its “network.” The decision revealed to me some of the usually enshrouded assumptions that writers make about their work and the media they choose to release it. The relationship is hardly linear; it’s not just writers cooking up work that media mechanically release to a readership. Over the years, Substack’s evolution unveiled assumptions that complicate and shift the simple linear creation-to-publication process.
I decided Substack’s emerging assumptions about writing and publishing weren’t really mine. The simple model of writers writing and then somehow publishing is too simple; it ignores useful signals that shape a writer’s creation as a piece moves toward a readership (or, as often is the case, toward the desk drawer or wastebasket), and it ignores the targeting or even creation of a readership—the key to “making a living” as a writer. Substack’s evolution as a “publishing service” is an example of how media—and particularly social media—nurture or contort writers and, in the process, shape them to fit publication processes and the readerships that those processes conjure up.
After four years, Substack and I grew apart, so I’m ending the relationship.
My initial choice to set up a “stack” was in no small measure just a way to solve an email problem. In 2022, I had few designs on literary quality, much less delusions of pursuing a life of writing. Through the Covid pandemic, it was my habit to send an email to my students every morning, a message they eventually named the “morning missive.” When I wasn’t nagging at them, which was infrequent, students found them useful and even entertaining, and for me it was a means to start a weekday in a summary of an interesting item I read, some quick take on happenings, a musing quite broadly defined, or sometimes a crabby snap at students slacking off in seminar readings. Most missives related to the theme and content of the course.
In late November 2021, as our class ended and we wandered out the door for the last time, a student asked me, “Now that we’re done with the semester, what will we do without the morning missive?” I had thought about that, too, and was intrigued by this new thing called Substack. I figured I couldn’t sustain a daily post, but a weekly one would do, and that was the start of my ‘stack named Technocomplex; it was for the students in fall 2021 and became part of the routine for the fall seminars I taught until this year.
Subscriptions were free and open to anyone who was willing to give me their email address. Substack at the time was simple: a set of templates for a website, a subdomain (mine: technocomplex.substack.com), and an easy way to send out emails to subscribers. Substack charges ten percent of paid subscriptions, which meant for me zero cost. I had no paid subscribers, and didn’t intend to start charging.
I have been, I guess, a freeloader, so it might be wrong of me to complain.
“Enshittification” is the fate of “any business characterized by network effects”
You know the process of enshittification has begun when something smells a little funny; you recognize it thoroughly when you step in it. The smell arose early for me and for many others when Substack launched Notes in Spring 2023, a few months after it had set up “Chat” for newsletter subscribers—additions to the service that roughly coincided with Elon Musk’s thoughtless vandalism of Twitter. Notes was, in a sense, a long(er)-form version of Twitter—similar enough that Musk took note and sought to undercut Substack by hobbling links directed to Substack and not allowing even liking or retweeting posts that included the word Substack. After much fulmination and drama, Twitter finally relented, as you would expect from what Nilay Patel then called “a world-historical clown car of a company currently operated by Elon Musk.”
But Musk was right: Substack was moving into the world once dominated by his even then bedraggled Twitter. Substack was becoming a social media platform. The question in my mind was whether Substack could still serve writers, as it had promised, or whether the shift to social media retargeted the platform—and Substack was by 2023 taking on the aura of a “platform,” a type of environment that we users of the web already know well. Indeed, Substack perhaps was destined to add services like its Chat and Notes because they deepened the reach and the penetration of Substack’s “network effects,” which Substack has claimed are effective to build writer communities and link up readers (mostly writers, it seems) with writers. “The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers,” the company blogged in an announcement about Notes, and probably for some, Notes and the “Substack network” have helped build an audience of subscribers. Yet, the promise that Notes “followers” would move to full fledged “subscribers” ended up unfulfilled. Followers remain followers, and it’s difficult to figure out how followers connect with writing. Most, it seems to me, are using Notes as a tamer Twitter or are merely lurkers or, worse, just bots.
And the high-minded intention of serving writers began to turn, first toward reshaping what writers’ roles were in the platform and imminently, if not already, shaping that role to the service of the platform.
Perhaps that’s just the way of the world of networks like Substack. In a recent post (yes, on Substack), Paul Krugman recently expanded on Cory Doctorow’s principle of “enshittification.”1Doctorow’s post defines the process in its first paragraph: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” The American Dialect Society chose enshittification as 2023’s Word of the Year Krugman cast the process in economic terms, broadening the process so that it applies well beyond the little world of Internet platforms. “The basic logic of enshittification—in which businesses start out being very good to their customers, then switch to ruthless exploitation—applies to any business characterized by network effects,” Krugman wrote. “It may go under different names like ‘penetration pricing,’ but the logic is the same.”
In July, Substack executives softened their initially hard stance on advertising. It might be okay; actually it might be what investors demand, but the move crosses the Rubicon for me and I suspect for many other Substackers. While courting new investors, co-founder Hamish McKenzie “said in an interview that Substack’s embrace of those models was not a change of heart but ‘a recognition of new possibilities’ enabled by the growth of the network, and that Substack would not simply ‘copy and paste the old models that ruined social media.’” It’s said that in part the plea for ads has come from “creators” on Substack and was not solely from pressures from Substack’s investors.
Recapturing what it means to be a writer
Krugman seems to see enshittification almost as a natural phenomenon. You build a business on “network effects,” and the whole sorry process takes place (except Krugman says the final stage is not death, contrary to Doctorow). So assigning blame for enshittification to Substack might be a bit unfair, even though the company has made other dubious choices along the way. Those choices led to an exodus from Substack beginning in late 2023, when it was revealed that Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists had set up shop on Substack and Substack leadership did little to constrain them: “I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no one held those views,” McKenzie said about the Nazi infestation. “But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.” In response, some Substackers fled to other platforms before Substack devolved into a Nazi bar.
The problem has apparently lingered in the Trump 2 era. Substack’s “most popular history Substack” according to Mother Jones is written by an amateur historian with a clever interest in the Nazi past. Within the past month, Taylor Lorenz of UserMag reported that Substack’s automated recommendation system sent “an undisclosed number of usersʼ phones” an invitation to subscribe to “NatSocToday,” which describes itself as “a weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.”
These are troubling developments of course, but I’ve found almost equally distracting the transformation of the Substack platform’s character in relation to writing: Perhaps simplistically and too idealistically, it once aimed to focus on writers and their craft and then turned into … something different—something that engages writers by binding them to apps, social media banter, video, streams, all with engagement statistics. It’s not totally clear to me, but Substack services point to a vision of writing life that simply doesn’t resonate with my vision, and the services that once promised engagement with thoughtful essays, fiction, and even poetry now seem to have transmogrified. Today, it seems, the point of Substack is more mindful of investors than of writers, and perhaps that is simply the way that business works, if Krugman is right. Substack’s writers change shape in the platform; they carry new burdens and have duties that the rules of engagement dictate, aided by apps and services that seem increasingly to contain them.
Maybe “content creators” are willing to nestle in the embrace of the Substack multimedia world and the writerly existence that it outlines. Content, after all, is contained.
So, I’ve begun a new “container” for my content … er, writing. It has no fancy services, but it suits me just fine. And there are no Nazis.
For the bibliographically curious: Newsletters have a business plan, but does it scale for consumers? Sachon, Logan. “How Much Are We Paying for Newsletters? $50, $100 … How About $3,000 a Year.” Business. The New York Times, May 10, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/business/substack-newsletter-subscription-costs.html. Gotta get revenues from somewhere to make the investors happy, you know: Benjamin Mullin and Jessica Testa, “Substack Raises $100 Million, Betting on Subscriptions but Coming Around to Ads,” Business, The New York Times, July 17, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/business/substack-fundraising-social-network.html. Krystal Scanlon, “Ad-Free Platform Substack Isn’t Ruling out Ads after All,” Digiday, March 31, 2025, https://digiday.com/marketing/ad-free-platform-substack-isnt-ruling-out-ads-after-all/. “Enshittification” happens in more places than the Internet (and, as Krugman points out, this is not a “general theory”): Paul Krugman, “The General Theory of Enshittification,” Substack newsletter, Paul Krugman, July 24, 2025, https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification. Substack v. Twitter: Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, “Twitter Takes Aim at Posts That Link to Its Rival Substack,” Technology, The New York Times, April 7, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/technology/twitter-substack-elon-musk.html. Nazi bar in the making? Eduardo Medina, “Substack Says It Will Not Ban Nazis or Extremist Speech,” Business, The New York Times, December 22, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/business/substack-nazis-content-moderation.html. Casey Newton, “Why Platformer Is Leaving Substack,” Platformer, January 12, 2024, https://www.platformer.news/why-platformer-is-leaving-substack/. Lee, Alexander. “Creators Are Ditching Substack over Ideological Shift in 2025.” Digiday, April 1, 2025. https://digiday.com/media/creators-are-ditching-substack-over-ideological-shift-in-2025/.
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Footnotes
- 1Doctorow’s post defines the process in its first paragraph: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” The American Dialect Society chose enshittification as 2023’s Word of the Year